The Glorious Mess That Has Come Our Way

TAMPA — There was a moment during the delirious week just past -- this was the moment when the margin of Florida votes between George W. Bush and Al Gore had shrunk to, I believe, 327. . . .

It was at that precise moment in the history of our republic that the thought occurred:

Three-hundred-twenty-seven people in Florida? That's the margin that could determine who is president of the United States?

There are Saturday nights when 327 people are standing in line trying to get a table at Joe's Stone Crab in Miami Beach.

There are Sunday afternoons when 327 people are waiting to go on the Space Mountain ride at Walt Disney World in Orlando.

There are any number of balmy Florida days when 327 people are sprawled on the sand in front of a single hotel in Ft. Lauderdale or Naples or Siesta Key.

Three-hundred-twenty-seven people in Florida?

Three-hundred-twenty-seven drunken people at a time routinely mass in front of one bartender during race week in Daytona Beach. Three-hundred-twenty-seven people at once are almost always waiting for their suitcases in the baggage claim area at the airport in Tampa. Three-hundred-twenty-seven people at a given moment are seemingly waiting to get in or out of the parking lot at just about any Winn-Dixie grocery store in the state.

There are those who have observed the political events of the week just past and who have reached the conclusion that the events represent a mess.

There are those who have observed the same events and who have reached the conclusion that the events represent the glory of the American experience.

So which is it -- a mess, or glory?

It's both -- it is a glorious mess.

And it's something that none of us will ever forget.

It makes us think -- in a way somehow not approached by anything that came before in the presidential campaign -- that this really is about two guys: two flesh-and-bone men who, even when surrounded by advisers and attorneys and family members, seem suddenly just about as alone and isolated in the world as two public figures have ever appeared.

Yet at the same time it makes us understand that this is not about two men at all. Theirs are the names and the photographs that will go into school textbooks for centuries to come -- but if on that level what is now occurring is all about them, on an arguably more profound level it has nothing to do with them.

The glorious mess is -- who would have thought it? -- refreshing. Renewing.

Why? Because for so long the political process has seemed to be inching away from the actual citizens of the United States, even as it has continuously given lip service to those citizens. The presidential campaigns have begun to seem like incestuous, exclusionary dances, minutely choreographed by the elected officials and the political operatives and the news media for their own mirrors-facing-mirrors amusement; the citizens are told from afar about the "war rooms" and the "spin process" as if national politics is some arch and never-ending parlor game played by those who need a membership card to be admitted -- a parlor game that doesn't necessarily include the regular citizens of the United States. The citizens are often referred to, by the professional political class, with the condescending phrase "real people," as if those men and women -- citizens -- who aren't included in the professionals' parlor game belong to some rustic and unknowing tribe that must be tracked down in the endless American forest that lies between the District of Columbia and Los Angeles.

How invigorating, then, to watch the political professionals in recent days as they -- along with the rest of us -- confront the possibility that no one knows the way out of this one. That cleverness and studied sophistication will not suffice -- that in days like the ones we are living through, we truly do begin to understand that the constitutional system of government under which we live is bigger than any of us -- bigger than Bush, bigger than Gore, bigger than the men and women who work for them and report on them.

The two men are the focus, of course; everywhere you go in this country during these special days and nights, you look at the people around you -- in airport corridors, on city streets, in restaurants -- and you know that virtually all of the people have spent at least part of their days thinking about the two men, knowing that before long one of the men will be the person to lead all of us.

Three-hundred-twenty-seven votes in Florida. During that one instant during the week just past, as the votes were being counted and counted again, that is what the potential direction of America came down to: 327 decisions out of almost 100 million votes.

It changes every hour, and you sense that moments like these may never happen again -- and for all the uncertainty of these moments, you begin to savor them, because the very uncertainty of it all is a reminder of something we sometimes come close to forgetting:

Democracy is not supposed to be easy. Freedom does not come with a map.